Technology presently exists for matching a query image against a corpus of reference images. In one example, this approach may be conceptualized as including an index creation (and index updating) phase and a search phase. In the index creation phase, such a system extracts image features from the reference images. The system then creates (or updates) an inverted index which maps the image features to reference images which contain those features. In a search phase, the system can extract image features from a query image. The system can then use those query features, together with the index, to find one or more reference images which may be similar to the query image.
The above-described operations are complex and time-consuming to perform. This negatively affects the responsiveness of both the index creation phase and search phase of such a system. This issue, in turn, reduces the utility of such an image matching system for reasons set forth herein.